How to Stop Excel from Displaying Text as Scientific Notation

Thanks for your reply.

I have thought of that but the SKU numbers are not consistently the same length. Some have 14; some have 16 or 18. Is there any way tell Excel that I want to covert the contents of cell A2?

Thanks,
Lyndy

Originally Posted by lyndy256

I have thought of that but the SKU numbers are not consistently the same length. Some have 14; some have 16 or 18. Is there any way tell Excel that I want to covert the contents of cell A2?

If the SKU "numbers" (IDs) might have more than 15 digits, it is important that they are entered into Excel as text, not numbers. Otherwise, Excel replaces the excess digits on the left with zeros. Obviously, that changes the SKU ID, and no amount of post-processing (e.g. using TEXT) will correct that.

I am not familiar with the Access-to-Excel procedure. Does it automatically go into Excel? Or does the Access data really go into a CSV file? Do you have the option to save the Access data into an XML file instead?

If the data goes into a text file (other than XML), and if the SKU IDs are in columns by themselves, not mixed with other truly numeric data, you need to import the text file instead of opening it directly in Excel.

Start Excel -- for example, click on the Excel icon, not the CSV file icon -- then click on Data, Get External Data, From Text. In Step 3, select the SKU ID column under "Data Previous", and select Text under "Column Data Format".

Thanks for your reply.

I should have mentioned that I received the data in txt format and have imported into Excel as you describe.

You can import most types of data into Access, including Excel and text.

I also tried directly importing the text file but I get a lot of errors and is not as smooth as importing Excel data.

Ultimately, my goal is to get the tables with the SKU ids in text format all appended in Access.

The issue of scientific notation seems to be a vexing and common issue in Excel.

Lyndy